Energy makes time

5 more weeks to the end of semester! It feels like everyone’s desperately counting down to November, which makes the insanely busy days feel just a wee bit better. In the past few weeks, I’ve had an essay by Mandy Brown very much on my mind, since she answers that fascinating question of why it is that we somehow manage to get so much done on some days, and so little on others. This is what she says.

“Here’s a concrete example, and perhaps a familiar one: someone is so busy with work and caretaking that they don’t make time for their art. At the end of the day they’re too tired to write or paint or make music or whathaveyou. So they don’t. Days, then weeks go by. They are more and more tired. They are getting less and less done…

Then one day they say fuck it all. They eat leftover pasta over the sink, drop mom off at her mahjongg game, and go sit in the park to draw. They draw for hours, until the sun goes down and they’re squinting under the street lights. And, lo and behold, the next day they plow through all those lingering to-dos. They see clearly that half of them were unnecessary when before they all seemed critical…

It turns out, not doing their art was costing them time, was draining it away, little by little, like a slow but steady leak. They had assumed, wrongly, that there wasn’t enough time in the day to do their art, because they assumed (because we’re conditioned to assume) that every thing we do costs time. But that math doesn’t take energy into account, doesn’t grok that doing things that energize you gives you time back. By doing their art, a whole lot of time suddenly returned. Their art didn’t need more time; their time needed their art.”

I’ve been trying to work by this principle a little more — to say yes to things (and people!) that energize and matter, and be bolder about refusing the people and things that do not. I suspect it’s working!

The rest of Brown’s essay can be found here: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/energy-makes-time/